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Monday, December 17, 2012

CLUJ-NAPOCA, ROMANIA

STATEMENT FROM EUROPEAN ROMA RIGHTS CENTER

PHOTO Around 300 Roma people evicted from Coastei Street in central Cluj now live on the edge of a landfill.

17
December 2012, Cluj-Napoca, Budapest: About 200 people will surround
the Cluj-Napoca City Hall today, as a reminder of a forced eviction and
relocation of about 300 people two years ago. The activists will be calling on
the local authorities to bring the Roma back into the city. The European Roma
Rights Centre, Amnesty
International, the Working Group of Civil Society Organisations and the
Community Association of Roma from Coastei are collaborating on a series of
events to mark the anniversary of the eviction.

Two years ago the local
authorities of Cluj-Napoca forcibly evicted about 300 people – mostly Roma –
from Coastei Street in the centre of the city. Since then, most of them have
been living on the furthest outskirts of Cluj-Napoca, close to a landfill and a
chemical waste dump in an area known as Pata Rât, where they were moved by the
municipality.

New research by the
ERRCshows that the Romani people evicted to Pata
Rât are facing obstacles in education, employment and healthcare as a result of
their relocation. Members of the community face discrimination and are
stigmatised because of their location very close to a rubbish dump.Soon
after their eviction, Romani people started a long struggle for justice. One of
them is Ernest Creta who now lives in an improvised home in Pata
Rât.

“It is a sad anniversary for us. On 17
December 2010, early in the morning, an impressive number of police forces
arrived on Coastei Street, joined by the local authorities. We were overwhelmed
and terrified by the number of police officers. Following pressure and verbal
threats from the local authorities, we accepted the housing they proposed
without knowing the exact location and the condition it was in,”said
Creta.

The new conditions were grim. About 30 out of the 76 evicted
families were not offered any alternative accommodation and were effectively
left homeless. The remaining 46 families were provided with one room per family.
They have to share communal bathrooms with three other families. The main
connection with the city is a school bus that leaves at 7.15 in the morning. The
closest regular bus stop is 2.5 kilometres away across the railway.

“We
were integrated in the life of the city when lived in Coastei Street. We used to
have jobs, the children went to high school, we had decent living standards, we
had access to the park, etc. Here, by the garbage dump, we feel like in a
ghetto, we feel discriminated against from all points of view,” said
Creta.

For the past two years, the Working Group of Civil Society
Organizations (gLOC), Amnesty International and the European Roma Rights Centre
(ERRC) have been supporting people from the former Coastei Street in their
struggle for justice and dignity. In their joint statement issued at the
anniversary of the December 2010 eviction, the organisations appeal to the local
authorities in Cluj-Napoca:

“The municipality carried out a forced
eviction that violated the human rights standards applicable in Romania. Central
government failed to ensure that the municipality’s actions did not lead to
human rights violations. The local and central authorities have an urgent
responsibility to put this violation right and to ensure that people who were
forcibly evicted are relocated to adequate housing, and brought back to the
city.”

People evicted from Coastei Street have been trying to meet the
authorities and raise the problem of their living conditions ever since the
eviction.

The municipality finally met with the former Coastei Street
residents earlier this year. The authorities said they would move the Romani
people away from Pata Rat starting from 2014, as part of a joint project with
UNDP. However details of the planned relocation are vague and the Romani
communities face more years of living in substandard accommodation that stops
them from fully accessing their basic rights to education, employment and
healthcare.

There are about 1,500 people living in Pata Rât area,
including about 300 people from the former Coastei. The others reside in
Cantonului street, Dallas and a number of people live on the city’s landfill.
The housing conditions in which all these people live are largely inadequate.
Iosif Adam, a resident from Cantonului Street explained:

“We just started
to organise ourselves. We do not want to be forgotten. Many of us were moved
here by the local authorities starting with 2002. We were told that this is
going to be a temporary location for us. And here we are in 2012: struggling
with the lack of identity papers, electricity, and water. It is a precarious
life, life in a great insecurity,”

Background

To mark two
years since the forced eviction and relocation to Pata Rât, the affected Romani
communities, the Community Association of Roma from Coastei, Amnesty
International, gLOC, ERRC, tranzit.ro, AltArt and the Faculty of Political,
Administrative and Communication Sciences at the Babes-Bolyai University have
organised a series of events, “Pata Rât 2012: Roma pushed to the
margins.”

The organisations are reminding the
Cluj-Napoca authorities and the Romanian government that around 1,500 Roma live
currently in the area of Pata Rât. Around 42% of them were moved there by local
authorities. Romani people from “Colina Verde”, Cantonului street, Dallas and
the landfill site suffer daily from the damaging effects of segregation and
substandard housing conditions, as well as racism and discrimination that
violate their human rights and dignity.

Amnesty International has documented that
forced evictions of Romani communities from informal settlements form a pattern
throughout Romania. There are no provisions in the law requiring the authorities
to serve adequate and reasonable notice prior to evictions of people living in
informal settlements. Although an eviction can be delayed if the people affected
challenge the court decision, they often only learn about the decision a few
days before the eviction, and also lack the resources to take legal action.
Evictions should not take place during the winter under international human
rights law.

Romania is party to a range of international
and regional human rights treaties, which guarantee the protection of the right
to adequate housing. These treaties include the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, The International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination and the Revised
European Social Charter. In the light of the obligation stemming from these
treaties, Romania has to ensure that the right to adequate housing, including
the right to be protected from forced evictions, is respected throughout the
country.

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FLAG OF THE ROMA

LOLO DIKLO : RrOMANI AGAINST RACISM

Lolo Diklo : Rromani Against Racism is an organization dedicated to providing information about the true situation of the Romani (Gypsies) in the world today. We are committed to confronting racism and oppression wherever it is found.

BACKGROUND

The Romani are a people who are not very well known. We are an ethnic group of people originally from India. We left India and arrived in Europe sometime in the 1300's. There are many theories as to why we left India. This is the work of academics, and we have some. Most Romani are more concerned about daily survival to worry about documentation of our past. We know who we are.

What is known about the Romani is, for the most part, stereotypically based. We are portrayed as romantic, carefree wonderers or child stealers, pick pockets and beggers.

Today the Romani of Europe face the same discrimination they have faced for centuries.